Monthly Archives: March 2009

On WoW insider, Allison Robert recently wrote up a post answering all your burning questions about druid patch 3.1 changes. It is a really well written and concise overview of the most major changes to the druid class that people could have questions about. It’s easier for me to just link to the post than to have to re-answer all the questions here later, so if you are still trying to wrap your head around all the 3.1 changes, I really recommend that youlook through that post on WoWinsider.

It covers a lot of things from tanking changes, mana regen changes, Eclipse moonkin changes, et cetra. I usually won’t make an entire blog post just to tell you to read a WoWinsider post, however this one is really important for druids that haven’t had time to track all the different changes, so it gets an extra special plug from me!

Rend and Tear now increases the critical strike chance of your Ferocious Bite ability on bleeding targets by 5/10/15/20/25%. (Down from 10/20/30/40/50%)

Primal Tenacity now reduces fear effects duration and damage taken while stunned while in Cat Form only

I’m pretty sure we already knew about these feral changes, as they were in the recent update to patch notes, but I wanted to bring attention to them, anyway. These changes should now be live on the PTR, so you can keep this in mind when testing out the feral abilities for the Tuesday arena PTR testing.

The moonkin form shifting mana cost change is really minor. They must be reducing it to be closer to what the new tree form mana cost is. Small buffs are still buffs, I suppose. Shifting a lot in PvP won’t drain as much moonkin mana, so I suppose it’s a good change.

You should refer to the DD forum post by GC for further info/reasoning on the recent string of feral nerfs. He’s actually been really good about communicating with feral druids on the forums over the last day or two.

And, of course, the best buff of all: graphic for chef’s hat! I suppose it’s time to start working on the daily quest and saving up 100 cooking awards!

Oh, and I think a lot of druids are excited about the possibility of getting a “starcaller” title from the Observed achievement in Ulduar.

Right now, I’m using a default wordpress template for restokin, that had all the features I needed, and looked cool enough that I could get away with using it for a while.

However, the site grew bigger and faster than I was expecting, and I really need a good banner to go on my site that better reflects the content of the blog. Greymatter and the moonkin repository both recently had banner contests, and I was really impressed by the overall quality of the banners that were submitted to their sites. So, borrowing a little from what Graylow did:

I know someone out there is a better artist than I am, and can come up with something better than me just writing “restokin” on a screenshot that I have on file.

So, so if your are an artist of some sort an would like to have some of your work displayed at the top of my blog, please submit a picture to my email address: lissanna70 (at) gmail.com

Here are some general guidelines for the banner:

1. The banner size I want is 920 (W) x 200 (H). You could go up to 250 (H) if you wanted to, but the 920 (W) I don’t really want to change.

2. It should say “Restokin” somewhere on the picture. I would also like it to say “Lissanna’s Blog about Warcraft Druids” (or something very similar), which can be in smaller letters than the main blog title.

3. It should have at least a moonkin and a tree form druid on it. Bear and cat forms optional.

4. I don’t care if it is computer generated or done by hand. I just want it to look good.

So, other then that you are welcome to be creative! I won’t be giving away prizes to the top choices (I’m still in “starving graduate student” mode). However, I will be posting all the submissions and giving credit to the artists at the end of the contest.

Please try and send me all the submissions by April 15th. Obviously by submitting a banner your giving me permission to use the picture for my blog.

Ghostcrawler posted a lengthy response in the feral druid PvP “nerf” thread, which contained a decent amount of information about how the developers think about PvP balance, but nothing that was really helpful for the ferals that felt their chance at pvp success in 3.1 had been taken away from them. Here’s an excerpt with what I consider to be the “meat” of GC’s post:

We made some adjustments to Feral damage in both PvE and PvP settings. Most of the nerfs are pretty straight forward, so it’s probably easy to understand what we were trying to accomplish with them.

We understand the point was to nerf feral PvE and PvP, I am still not sure why feral PvP needed to be tuned down. It’s possible that when the developers made massive sweeping changes to other classes recently, including a significant nerf to fear mechanics, that feral stood out too high on their internal testing, but that almost just doesn’t make sense. I’m fairly convinced at this point that it’s not possible to balance all the classes for arena pvp, that there will always be complaints about PvP balance on the forums, and it could all just be a lost cause at this point.

I tend to not write a lot about feral PvP, since it’s usually my weakest area of mechanics & theorycrafting knowledge. However, I think the problem with the latest round of changes is that most of the changes came because of feral being too strong at PvE (in raid DPS on Ulduar testing), and not necessarily related to any PvP testing at all on the PTR. Thus, I think some of the PvP nerfs weren’t really intended to be PvP nerfs. So, that’s why it’s really not obvious to people like me. I’m even more concerned since I have been directing people to pick up feral PvP specs for arena, as resto & balance druids aren’t looking so great for arenas in 3.1 the last few weeks, either.

Now that I’m done with the “doom and gloom” segment of this post, lets get to what we can do about it, and where the weaknesses actually are. The most constructive post about feral’s PvP weaknesses (and how to fix the problem) in PvP comes from Deep in the Damage Dealing forums.

I really wanted to draw attention to Deep’s main point. Feral druids rely on finishing moves (rip and savage roar) to boost their damage. Both of these are easy to keep up in PvE raids, but are hard to use correctly in arena PvP (even if they look theoretically good on paper and lead to bursty damage on rare occassions).

The “savage roar” problem described by Deep is similar to what is probably causing moonkin druids a lot of problem in PvP. A lot of moonkin damage now comes from Eclipse, which is unreliable in PvP settings, and thus moonkin automatically take a damage hit when they enter arena settings. Being able to do high PvE damage seems to overshadow moonkin survivability and mana issues in PvP.

Dependency on spells or abilities that are great for PvE and not so great for PvP make balancing the pvp aspects of our class a lot harder than it should be. At this point, I just hope that other classes got tuned down enough that feral and moonkin will be able to do well enough to keep druids in the arena game.

Then again, the complaints coming from the balance PvP community has little to do with damage done, and more to do with survivability/mana regen/utility issues. Maybe damage done by druids is less of a problem than the damage done to druids by the other classes that are performing well in pvp situations.